Long Way Out, The

By Michael Wiley

Franky Dast is an unlikely hero.

Wrongly convicted and later exonerated of killing two boys, Franky went on to uncover the real murderer. Now a 'free man' but living on the edges of society, for some he will always be tainted by his dark past.

That's why a desperate Mexican family turn to him, rather than trust the authorities, to help them track down their teenage daughter's murderer. He is compelled to help but comes up against the detectives who wrongly put him away, and people who are determined to blame the dead girl.

When another body shows up and he is personally threatened, Franky doubles-down on his investigation. Can Franky stop this vicious killer and find his own way out of his personal hell before it's too late?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Severn House
• Release date: Jan 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781448309856

Michael Wiley

Michael Wiley was brought up in Chicago, and now teaches literature at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. He is the Shamus Award-winning author of three previous novels in the Chicago-based Joe Kozmarski PI series

Book preview

ONE

Two hours before dawn, the Cardinal Motel seemed to exhale. The huffing, the fake ecstasy, and the wall-pounding laughter quieted. Skinny-armed men slunk from the rooms, along the sidewalks, and into the dark. Girls, clutching fistfuls of twenties, climbed into the passenger seats of idling cars. A boy stopped howling in the room on the end. The last of the nighttime semis passed on Philips Highway. A hundred yards beyond the highway, a freight train stood silent on the tracks, where it would remain until the railroad bridge over the St Johns River came down after a barge went through.

If I stepped from my room, I would smell the rich vegetable rot of the lowland trees and river mud.

I sat on my bed and opened the vinyl case Music Time threw in for free when I bought a French horn. I touched the bell, the slides, the valves, the levers, the leadpipe.

No fake ecstasy.

I brought the mouthpiece to my lips.

What did freedom sound like two hours before dawn?

I made a sound – a note, not much of one.

I made another.

When I was a kid, my sixth-grade music teacher Mrs Wendorff taught our class ‘Across the Stars’ from Star Wars and gave me a solo in the spring concert.

Later, during the summer after I finished high school, Detective Bill Higby taught me other songs, chiming to metal bars and doors. I yelled against that music, but it played and played for eight years – three on death row, five in Supermax – until Judge Peterson said, Get out of jail free, and everyone else said, How could we have let this happen?

An eight-year-long jingle grows from an earworm into a dragon – and shrivels back into a soul-eating parasite. Tell the Raiford guards you need to go to the medical center for that, and they’ll clank their batons along the steel bars like a xylophone, singing, This will be the day that you …

Behind those bars, I dreamed of the French horn day and night – promised myself if I ever got free … Other prisoners sang their songs. We sang in the prison yard, sang in the cells. You’d have thought you walked into choir practice.

Sitting on my bed in the Cardinal Motel, I tried to recall ‘Across the Stars’ one false note at a time. I touched the horn, and I made sounds – something like the notes I’d known from before Higby – but other notes clanged over them, dropping steel pipes on concrete.

The difference between harmony and cacophony … Mrs Wendorff told the class.

My friend Stuart at Raiford said the CIA crushed captives with sound torture in Iraq. He said, before that, the ATF and FBI played Nancy Sinatra’s ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking’ mixed with rabbits getting slaughtered to shake David Koresh and the Branch Davidians at Waco. Stuart said, Keep it together, Franky. Think good thoughts. Whistle a happy tune.

I whistled ‘Across the Stars’ until the guards brushed their batons across the bars.

Now, two hours before dawn, sitting on my bed in the dark, I blew the horn across the galaxy, closer and closer to the hot center where gravity crushes like a fist on Q-Wing, where men wait the last days before the Death House and the prison tailor comes, humming that incessant music, to measure them for execution suits. Stuart said, I don’t sugarcoat it, Franky. You know I’m a straight shooter, with that big, gentle laugh, which is what got me in this predicament to begin with. He fooled the tailor and the executioner at last, dying of three-hundred-pound diabetes before they could find a vein.

In my room at the Cardinal Motel, I played across the sky from Polaris to Sirius, Antares to the Pleaides, though sixteen inches of plaster ceiling, beams, and rooftop gravel separated me from the stars. The shapes of constellations made no sense. The universe never ticked like a clock. If you hold a star map up close to the face of a star, it’ll burn. A well-ordered universe is a lie we tell to make ourselves feel good. The sooner we all agree on that, the better. Then we can get on with it.

I got through four measures, more or less recognizable, when Jimmy and Susan pounded on the wall next door. ‘Four thirty in the morning! Don’t you know it’s against the law to kill a cat?’

I yelled back, ‘Kind of ironic after you bang your bed all night. Who do you think you are with that moaning and groaning? Beyoncé? What office are you running for? Hypocrite in Chief?’

I hadn’t slept for three days and nights, and the Raiford music was winning in my head. Crushing me.

Jimmy and Susan must’ve sensed the danger because Jimmy – who usually liked a fight – yelled, ‘Nothing I hate more than a bully, man.’ Five minutes later, Mr Hopper, who owned the Cardinal, knocked at the door.

‘What are you doing, Franky?’ he said. ‘You know we can’t have this.’ He wore a black bathrobe, his chest hair – as gray and curly as the hair on his head – poking from the top. A cool November breeze blew into the room.

‘I’ll be quiet.’

‘You will if you want to keep living here.’

‘You’d kick me out for a little music after Jimmy and Susan shake the roof twenty hours a day?’

‘Number one, what you were doing wasn’t music. Number two, you’re going to throw Jimmy and Susan under a bus?’ Hopper was a born-again, who’d bought the motel on Philips Highway so he could rent rooms to people like me who no one else wanted, not even our families, on the principle that Jesus and Mary were undesirables and drifters too.

‘Play that thing somewhere else,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to run a place.’

‘Fine.’

He stared at my face. ‘You look lousy.’

‘I’m OK.’

He gazed past me into the room. ‘You sure?’

‘Yeah – I’m going to shower and go to work.’

‘The cats?’

‘Until something better comes along.’

‘I don’t like them. Not even in a circus.’

‘Right.’

He nodded at the horn. ‘You sure you’re done with that?’

‘Yeah, I’m sure.’

He scratched his chin. ‘I like having you here, but maybe you’re outgrowing this, you think?’

Everyone had been trying to pry me out of the Cardinal lately. When Cynthia spent the night with me, she would lie awake, listening to the noise from the other rooms. ‘This is a shithole, Franky. A very loud shithole,’ she would say. ‘Don’t you think it’s time to move?’

The truth was, after my time at Raiford, I liked it – the sound of wild living. The Cardinal Motel kept me on an honest edge.

‘I’m good here,’ I told Hopper.

‘No,’ he said, ‘you don’t look so good.’

TWO

Nine years earlier, Detective Higby testified, so help him God, that I killed Duane and Steven Bronson, ages fifteen and thirteen, on a rotten rainy night – me barely more than a kid myself. The judge and jury liked his lies. The blood of two young boys made them hungry for a reckoning, and one bowl of sugar tasted as good as another, even if it sickened them later.

The day after sentencing, as a van drove me to Raiford, I put my nose to the window and watched the highway-side woods like a kid on a school bus. The guard said, ‘Take it all in now, son. Those are the last trees you’ll see in this lifetime.’ We passed an encampment where Mexican and Haitian migrants slept after grinding their knuckles in overheated farm fields. The guard said, ‘There’ll come a day when you envy them shit weasels. That day’ll come real soon.’

Later, when Judge Peterson called the conviction a miscarriage and told my lawyers from the Justice Now Initiative that the State of Florida owed them a debt of gratitude for their persistence in righting a wrong, I wanted to go out in the woods and run and run until I lost myself in the green freedom. But the guard got the second point right – before then, I would’ve traded my cell for heatstroke and a plate of beans.

When I first came out, Dr Patel, my reintegration counselor, said, ‘Give it time.’

I said, ‘They took eight years of my life. I’ve got no time.’

‘Nice and easy – that’s the way.’

‘You’re asking too much,’ I said.

‘The odds are against you, Franky. You can’t run away from your past, and you can’t run toward the future. You need to deal with the present with your feet planted squarely on the ground.’

‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘I can run and run. When I was a kid, before they crammed me in prison, I ran the trails through the forest behind my house. Anything going on at home or school? It disappeared.’

‘But you’re no longer a kid, are you?’

I said, ‘Once, when I was thirteen, I ran around a bend in a trail and came face to face with a wild hog and her piglet. Up until then, I never saw anything so ugly and scary. The mama hog’s nostrils widened, and her eyes were like black holes. She didn’t look angry. She looked curious. She seemed to be wondering how I could be so stupid as to stand there with my feet square on the ground.’

Dr Patel gave me a tight-lipped smile. ‘You aren’t unintelligent, Franky.’

‘Funny thing is, my dad taught me that if I ever came on a hog that way, I should stand tall and calm and face it down like you say, and then I should back away nice and easy.’

‘Did it work?’

‘I don’t know. I turned and ran. I went back down the path – then left it and pushed through the palmettos and staggerbush. Even after the mama hog cut from the chase, I ran.’

Dr Patel set his notebook on a side table. ‘I guess it turned out for you that time.’

‘I got lucky.’

He considered me. ‘You like animals?’

‘Not wild hogs.’

‘How did you feel afterward – after you escaped?’

I had run, the fat leaves slapping my legs, my chest, my face, the ground soft under me, the mama hog at my heels, its fur as brown as mud and rough as thistle. I’d run, as if in a dream, chased by a fear that could tear me apart with its tusks and teeth. At some point, after the hog quit and trotted back to her piglet, I broke through the scrub into a clearing, and I seemed to pass from one dream into another. In the clearing, surrounded by miles of forest, the ruins of a wall rose toward the sunlight. It was made of oyster-shell tabby and seemed ancient. A glassless window – as high on the wall as a second story – looked into the woods, and the sunlight angled through the gap, tricking on dust and pollen. I stopped, gasping for air – if the hog had still hunted me, it would’ve ripped me apart – and for a moment, I thought I saw heaven.

I told Dr Patel, ‘I felt fine. Relieved.’

‘Naturally.’ He picked up his notebook and wrote in it. ‘I can make a call. I think you would benefit from an activity that fills your need for a certain intensity but also refocuses your energies from your own pain on to alleviating the sufferings of others. I think this might be therapeutic for you, yes?’

‘A job?’ The work I’d done with the Justice Now Initiative when I first came out from prison blew up when I went after Higby instead of doing what they assigned me to do. I exposed the detective for what he was. Later, I found the man who murdered the Bronson boys.

‘You need one, yes?’

‘What’s the pay?’ I said.

‘Are you in a position to haggle?’

‘Being at a disadvantage hasn’t stopped me before.’

He set up an interview at Safe Haven, south of the city, in wetlands where a plantation once farmed slash pines for the pulp mills. Safe Haven rescued big cats from private owners and roadside zoos. They’d pulled an albino leopard from a cage behind a Jiffy Lube where one of the technicians had kept him since winning him in a bet. Judy Pollard ran the refuge, funded by her family, who owned the land.

Safe Haven locked a chain across the end of a gravel road. In heavy rains, the road flooded, stranding Judy, her wife Diane, and their eighteen-year-old assistant, Zemira. They neutered the male cats. When an animal died, they buried it in an acre-wide cemetery planted with wild flowers. They banned visits from the public.

The eighteen-year-old, skinny in overalls, let me in through the gate. She eyed me like I was more dangerous than lions or leopards. I drove a half mile to a wooden house where the three women lived surrounded by a compound of cages, enclosures, and work sheds. They’d landscaped the area with angel’s trumpet and African tulip trees, elephant ear plants, palms, and, between the leopard and tiger enclosures, a bamboo grove. Orchids hung from hooks on the sides of the work sheds. A space to the side and behind the wooden house looked like a little junkyard with trucks on blocks, others parked side by side, and, tucked under an aluminum carport, a rusty GMC Sierra Grande pickup that seemed most of the way to being an antique.

Judy and I sat down at a picnic table in front of the house. She said, ‘I hate people,’ as if that was her first interview question.

‘Looks like this is the right kind of place for you,’ I said.

‘I run Safe Haven because I’m done hurting,’ she said. ‘And I’m tired of watching people harm others. What do you think of that?’

‘Anyone who says she’s done hurting must be hurting badly,’ I said. ‘Anyone who stops caring about others must be hurting even worse. You can’t turn that off.’

‘I can try.’ She pulled a pack of Marlboros from her vest and lit one. ‘You’re talking from experience?’

‘Is that what Doctor Patel told you?’

‘He may have hinted.’

‘If you don’t mind my asking, how do you know him?’

‘He comes out once a month,’ she said. ‘My brother insists on it if I want my family to give me money for this place.’

‘What do you think of your brother doing that?’

‘To hold on to Safe Haven, I would deal with the devil.’

‘I’d like a job if you can use me,’ I said.

She gave me the keys to a Ford F-150 they used to pick up chicken and goat carcasses. ‘The cats wake up hungry, and that means you work early. Can you handle that?’

An hour before dawn on the morning when Jimmy and I shouted at each other through the motel wall, I stood in the shower humming ‘Across the Stars,’ the mental clank of metal sinking in the drain.

Then I drove the Ford out on Philips Highway.

A mile north, the brilliant orange and white lights of Sahara Sandwiches shined from the roadside. I swung in close to the front door. Except for a hooker who sometimes stood inside the front window with a shoulder-high walking stick, I seemed to be the only one who ever came in an hour before sunrise. I ordered a fried egg sandwich from the bald counterman and said, ‘You ever think of playing music? Warm up the place?’

He looked as if I’d suggested putting a plate of sample turds on the counter. He went to the grill.

When he handed me my sandwich, wrapped in waxed paper, he said, ‘I like it quiet.’

Thirty minutes later, I pulled from a narrow highway into the drive at Chartein Poultry Farm, which supplied about half of the meat for the Safe Haven cats. A singlewide trailer stood by the entrance, across from a large sign with the farm name and a painting of a white hen pecking corn from the ground and a black hen craning its red-combed head back, its yellow beak open so wide it seemed it could pluck clouds from the sky. The hens looked real enough to be photographs, but the clouds and sky were too brilliant, overexposed with whites and silvers, as if brightened by a double sun.

The lights were on in the kitchen of the singlewide. The farm manager, a wiry fifty-year-old named Everett Peters, lived in the trailer with an old German shepherd he treated better than his workers. Normally at this hour, the six chicken houses at the end of the drive were dark, the only sound from them the thick, low whine of industrial fans mounted in the back. This morning, two pickup trucks and a car stood in front of Chicken House Three. The exterior lights on the building and the ones to either side of it – typically used only when a coyote or fox had been burrowing under the flooring – shined over a dozen men and women.

When I climbed from the Ford by the singlewide, Peters came out with a mug of coffee, followed by the old dog. He squinted up the drive at the chicken houses, then came down his wooden steps.

‘Ninety birds for you in the cold shed,’ he said.

If a chicken died, the processing plant refused it. The farm buried it in a compost pit or gave it to Safe Haven.

A car door slammed by the chicken houses. ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

Peters frowned. ‘One of the Mexicans ran off and got lost.’

‘Who?’

‘The girl.’

‘Antonia?’ Fourteen years old, Antonia would watch me as I loaded carcasses on to the truck bed. She would ask questions or tell me about herself. She had come from Jalisco with her mom to be with her dad when he found year-round work at the farm. She had a loud, startling laugh. Her dad sometimes called her a simpleton – an imbécil – because she talked to men like me too quickly. But she’d always seemed clever to me.

‘That’s the one,’ Peters said.

‘She ran away?’ Twice in the past month, she’d wanted to hitch a ride with me back to the city instead of going to school. I’d turned her down and told her that kids who skipped school found sorrow nine times out of ten.

‘What did they find the tenth time?’ she’d asked.

‘Aren’t you afraid?’ I’d said.

She would rather die than be afraid, she’d told me, and I got the sense that her life had already given her plenty to be scared of if she’d given in to it. Anyway, she said, the kids at school were dumb, and so were the teachers.

Peters said, ‘She went out last night and didn’t come home. Her family’s been making a racket since two in the morning.’

By the time we finished loading the birds into the back, the morning sun hung low in the sky, and most of the people by the chicken houses had driven or walked away.

Antonia’s mom and dad stood by a remaining truck, along with a thick-shouldered Haitian I recognized as one of the dad’s friends and a short, gray-haired man named Harry, who was Mrs Chartein’s brother. I’d met Antonia’s dad, Martin Soto, once or twice. I knew her mom was named Alejandra only because Antonia had told me.

But when I climbed from the Ford, Alejandra rushed to me and took one of my hands in hers. She had Antonia’s wide face and large eyes. ‘Franky?’ she said.

‘Sure.’

‘You are asesino, yes? You kill?’

‘No,’ I pulled away.

‘You were in jail? The boys?’

‘I didn’t do it.’ I’d never told Antonia about my past, but any school kid with five minutes on the internet could find out about the conviction. Or maybe everyone at Chartein Farm knew.

‘You find the man who kill the boys? That is you?’

‘I helped.’

She smiled. ‘You will find Antonia.’

Not a chance. Last time I tried to help strangers, stopping when Duane and Steven Bronson broke down while joyriding in their mom’s car, eight years of my life fell into a hole and kept falling. Before my life went to hell, my dad used to say, Never answer the phone if you don’t know who’s calling. Don’t answer the door if you don’t know who’s knocking. I’d told him that was a rotten way to think, not to mention impractical, but since then I’d come around.

‘What happened?’ I asked Antonia’s mom.

Half in English, half in Spanish, she made me understand that Antonia had gone dancing at Bar Deportivo with her cousin Clara. Alejandra and her husband had prohibited her from going, but after dinner Antonia walked out to the highway, where Clara – who was twenty-four and reckless – picked her up. There was a boy Antonia wanted to see. He was supposed to be at the bar after he got off work at a restaurant, but the manager kept him late. At midnight, when Clara looked for Antonia, she was gone.

‘You checked with the boyfriend?’

‘Por supuesto. Of course.’

Antonia had told me about him too – a nineteen-year-old named Carlos, who’d also come up from Jalisco. He served burritos and pitchers of margaritas seven nights a week at El Jimador, three miles to the south of me on Philips. ‘You’re a kid,’ I’d said. ‘The guy is five years older?’

She’d laughed. ‘He’s very immature.’

I asked her mom, ‘Does she have a phone?’

‘No – Martin, mi esposo – my husband – he has the phone. It is too much. Es muy caro, do you understand?’

‘Too expensive, yes.’

‘You will look for her?’ she said.

Don’t answer the door. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’

She seemed confused, angry. ‘Why do you stop the truck if you will not help? Why do you get out?’

‘I like Antonia.’

‘You like her?’

‘I’m sure she’s fine.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘no, she is not fine. They know who she is. The children at school.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘They call her the names. They threaten her.’

‘With what?’

Her mother leaned toward me. ‘She come home with a paper. They say what they will do to her. They draw pictures. But what can we do? We cannot complain. We cannot tell the police. We stay quiet. Now she is gone.’

As she talked, a Jeep drove toward us on a dirt road from the brick house at the far end of the property, where Douglas and Bella Chartein lived. During one of my early-morning pickups, Mr Chartein had told me he grew up on this land when it was little more than trees and scrub. Before marrying, he built the first of his chicken houses. Over the following decades, he put up six long aluminum sheds and became one of the biggest poultry producers in North Florida. He and his wife, who grew up a half mile away, started out in the singlewide trailer where their manager now lived. As the business grew, they built their brick house and, behind it, three cottages, along with housing for their workers. Two of the cottages were empty. They let Harry live in the other in exchange for handling the farm-to-plant logistics, a part-time job he combined with a house-painting business he ran from a van. Harry dressed like the other workers, but Mrs Chartein wore dresses and creased linen pants, Mr Chartein khakis and loafers.

The Jeep stopped by the men, and Mr Chartein climbed